Flying High - Kestrel Audio's KT-200 is a Stylish & Capable Turntable to Worry Rega
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- Опубликовано: 7 окт 2024
- Mike and David continue their never-ending search for hi-fi bargains with this interesting new sub-£1,000 turntable, complete with unipivot tonearm and swish real wood veneered plinth - all hand-made in England.
As long-time Rega Planar 3 fans (and users), the guys are impressed by its very competitive sound and classy build quality. It's not the world's best sounding vinyl-spinner but Mike and David think it's better than you'd expect for the price - leaving more budget for LP records!
Each episode of Hi-Fi Riff features Mike and David's unedited, unexpurgated views about all manner of weird and wonderful hi-fi designs. Business executive Mike has a wealth of knowledge from previous hi-fi retail experience, and David has written about hi-fi for thirty years. Now Editor-in-Chief of StereoNET, he's picked up a few things along the way.
So relax and enjoy some one-take hi-fi riffing - and please leave your comments below. And don’t forget to hit the Subscribe button, this one goes up to eleven!
The eighties-tastic title tune is called ‘UFO/Mike’s Jumper’, and used with the express permission of our old pal and rights holder Simon Lythe.
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![Natanael Cano - Amor Eterno [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EO4prCs6WpM/mqdefault.jpg)
Jolly Old England! One country I've always wanted to visit, especially if dudes like this are this funny and such good conversationalists! No hifi snake oil here!!
Lots of snake oil there, the same as everywhere.
Speaking on behalf of an entire nation, you would be most welcome here! Bring an umbrella, though...
You guys are the best. Really enjoy your reviews!!!
Outstanding as usual gents!
Not only do you have one of the best channels, you also have by far the best comments (IMHO)!
We are feeling the love :-) Mike
Very interesting riff guys, thanks for sharing.
Years ago a colleague owned a MG Meastro, at five years old the engine actually fell out due to the engine mounts corroding! He was not a happy bunny discovering how bad the UK car industry standards were at the time!
Jim🏴🙂
Brilliant!!!!
Great riff as usual, thanks for bringing Kestrel to my attention, obviously a make to keep an eye on.
Great to see you guys promoting a new product in the market. The thumbs up from you both will really help them.
PS- My uncle had the MG Maestro in 83 and the synthesized voice of Nicollete Mckenzie was just so space age I thought it was so cool!! ha ha
Our friends dad had one too... but he hated the voice so much he never drove the car! :-) Mike
"Warning: Low Oil Pressure!" 🤣
@@MrVinylista common occurrence in a Maestro!! ha ha
Nice riff guys good to get the history and DNA. As an old PT user I always enjoy turntable/arm reviews. Cheers chaps.
Thank you. It was a good Riff to do.... even though I kept going off at a tangent! Mike
@@Hi-FiRiffthat’s ok Mike its part and parcel of the enjoyment.
@@stevehollingbery9744 Speak for yourself.
Interesting as usual. I guess Rega (and Project) have the big advantage of established names, wide availability and reputations for longevity (my Rega Planar 2 still works after over 40 years!), but more competition has to be good!
It's good competition too, the unipivot arm is super cool! Mike
Trivia.......The Maestro was a better car than the TR7?
The supreme irony, a TR7 driver calling someone a poser? :)
Priceless! :-) Mike
@@Hi-FiRiff Get a room, you two!
I know that the name Kestrel's supposed to evoke an elegant and powerful bird of prey, but I'm immediately put in mind of cheap lager.
Me too! I nearly mentioned that, but I thought it might be too niche! Mike (PS it was all David and I could afford back in the day!). Mike
Looks far better than a Rega 3
It is a very cool looking piece of equipment... hoping to get more from the Kestrel guys in the future. Mike
I own a planar 3, Thorens TD 160 and an Ariston rd80, used to also own a project RPM 5. They all sounded the same.
Was the MG Maestro and Van den Plas versions' voiced by Nicollette Mackenzie?Very posh... appreciations for another spiffing Riff chaps.
It's scary the information DP carries around in his brain! Never a dull moment. Mike
Have you been stuck in the same storm for the past week? Time runs at a different speed in Wiltshire.
🙂
... and in Oxfordshire apparently! :-) Mike
@@Hi-FiRiff Here in Wiltshire, we call Oxfordshire "the far East". It must be the rainy season over there...
Is there nothing in the vast Pro-ject product line around that price point that is competitive? I'd be surprised. But it's good to see new players in this segment not just the usual suspects.
Pro ject, rega, fluance, uturn all have similar products like this.
I'd rather buy something with a removable headshell at this price
I do remember that storm. I was in London, England at the time, pretending to study while being constantly stoned on pot.
I was in North London visiting Mike that night, who had a drink and fell asleep. So I decided to leave about 9PM, and just as I did the rain arrived and it began lashing down. I ended up doing about 30MPH in my TR7 heading west up the M40, then pulled off, parked in a side road and fell asleep in the car. I woke up to find trees, bins and road signs down everywhere, and even some house roofs off. Had to drive around the debris on the final stretch home!
@@MrVinylista I believe I was living in Brent Cross, just by the North Circular, at the time. I don't remember any particular damage in that area. I mostly lived that storm through the telly.
Not the Maestro fact you're looking for, but my favourite one is that its front track width is 43mm wider than the 1800 "Landcrab's" as it had to accommodate a huge new gearbox, which BL never got round to making, instead using much shorter transmissions bought in from VW and Honda. The absolute apogee of British motor industry incompetence!
Thanks for the fun fact. But it could be conspiracy rather than cock-up. For example, the Jaguar XJ40 was designed to have a long, narrow engine bay so it could never be given the Rover V8 - thus forcing British Leyland engineers to develop the prototype inline 6 Jag AJ6 engine. When they later decided to fit Jag's V12 in it, they had to design new inner wings!
@@MrVinylista Nobody seems to have challenged that 'Rover V8 into XJ40' claim. It would have been a simple matter of getting out of an overheated office in a management suite with a measuring tape, then a phonecall to Solihull. People were putting Rover V8s into MG Midgets and Ford Escorts. The Jaguar V12 was a different matter, with reverse-flow cylinder heads which placed the carburettors or fuel injection on the outside of the vee, making it a tight fit even in the original XJ12. Over at Austin Rover in the mid-80s it was very different. CEO Harold Musgrove, a real engineer, sorted out such matters with a lump hammer in the experimental shop, probably to the horror of his Honda "partners"!
@@robertleitch2016 That story has strong provenance - many including LJK Setright have told it over the years. If there is a counterfactual' to it, I suspect it's more about Jaguar saving money - because the then new AJ6 was a close cousin of the earlier XK engine, so maybe Jaguar wanted to retain much of the XJ6 S3's engine compartment topology?
@@MrVinylista David - I'll test the limits of RUclips's comments system to quote from Jeff Daniels' 'Jaguar - The Engineering Story' from 2004:
“There was one further option, which was to scrap the idea of a unique Jaguar engine and to adopt the Rover 3.5-litre V8, already admired both for its light weight - it too being of linered all-alloy construction - and for the efficiency with which it powered the Rover 3500 (SD1) and Range Rover. It was already known that the V8 would stretch at least to 4-litre capacity and, with fuel injection, ought to deliver enough power to enable the high-range XJ40 to meet its performance targets. There is a story that the Jaguar body designers deliberately ensured the V8 would be very difficult to fit beneath the XJ40 bonnet, but the truth is more mundane.
The Jaguar argument in this case was four-fold. One: however good the Rover engine might be, 'Jaguar owners expect a unique Jaguar engine in their cars: Two: 'the Rover V8 is basically of US design and this would not be good for the US market in which the Jaguar would be seen as having an 'ordinary' engine.' (It is interesting that this consideration did not stop the Range Rover from enjoying considerable later success in the USA). Three: an estimated £11,870,000 investment would be needed to duplicate the Rover engine plant to provide sufficient capacity. In other words; the Rover alternative would be at least as expensive as the updated XK one. Four: the adoption of a Rover engine with the implication that engine production would be moved away from Radford would be likely to cause 'industrial relations problems' there; and everybody in the conference room in which the case was presented would have devoted a lot of their time to worrying about industrial relations problems. It is odd now to look back with the knowledge of hindsight, and note that in 1997 the Radford plant pushed out the last V12 engine and then shut its doors; but in 1979 that seems to have been a conclusive argument. Not only the XJ40, but also the AJ6 would go ahead, Jaguar would get its unique (and lightweight) engine and production would take place at Radford.”
@@robertleitch2016 Very interesting, thanks. I don't dispute any of this, but am simply reporting what I was told by the late, great LJK Setright, in person, when I used to regularly lunch with him in the mid 2000s. He was there at the original press launch and spoke to Jaguar engineers at length, as you can imagine. I'm sure it was a combination of factors, all taken in the round, but he was clear that there was a sense of "we're not having that V8 in our car" - and they thought the Jag V12 would be outlawed soon due to emissions.
His story about the original mid eighties Honda Legend launch in Tokyo is my personal favourite. Apparently a member of the German press told Honda engineers that their new automatic transmission could not work because Mercedes had tried and failed to get the concept right. "But we are Honda", came the reply...
Greetings from KL, Hi Dave & Mike, between a Linn LP12 circa 87 and the original Roksan Xerxes ,which one would you prefer and why?
At that age, it depends on the condition of the decks. A tired LP12 will be much worse than a fresh Xerxes, and vice versa. All things being equal, with both decks being in very good condition, it's pretty much a tie. The Linn sounds more musical and fluid, the Roksan is more neutral with better detail and speed stability. Mike and I both chose LP12s, that year - upgrading from our Rega Planar 3s.
I retailed both in the late 80's and even tried the Xerxes with SME V and AT OC9 vs Lp12, Ittok Troika and definitely preferred the LP12 by a long margin. Mike
But is it as good as the Rega 50th Anniversary P3 for around that price?
Phono preamp anytime soon?
Headshell is on the wrong side in ARO photo. Not sure how you did that.
The photo's just the wrong way round, a mirror image. Everything's on the wrong side.
@@gaborozorai3714 Mike's whole life is a mirror image world. That photo explains a lot!
For me a turntable needs to be Quartz locked Direct Drive, made in Japan with a swap-able tonearm!!
and have buttons!!
Is this David in disguise? :-) Mike
@@Hi-FiRiff lol not quite Mike.
@@Hi-FiRiff "I think he's turning Japanese, he's turning Japanese, I really think so..."
They need to heap praise. This is a commercial not a review. “Thank you guys for letting us listen to it” no way I would use this as a guide to purchase a turntable.
Can can anyone listen to it on digital media? It's an analogue turntable on a RUclips channel. It's not possible to listen to thison RUclips in any meaningful way
Mike was just being polite, that's all. All his life, he has been unfailingly and sometimes (from my point of view) annoyingly polite!
We made no commercial gain from the review. We don't take advertising and the deck itself went back to Kestrel last week.
Yes, absolutely, and I could not agree more.
You are the only person who can decide what's right for you and that's why I strongly suggest you listen to it yourself against all the competition.
As I mention, sometimes this can be tricky, but best of luck!
The good news is that there are some fab turntables at that price point.
Mike
I hope you don’t use the Naim Arrow in the pic at 6.45 as the tracking will be well off🤣🤣
That explains all that end-of-side distortion from Mike's LP12! 🤣
@@MrVinylista I guess the use of an Aro in an effort to add some P.R.A.T to Mikes system. No jokes about the pratt listening please🤣🤣🤣
Btw high tolerance = bad, low tolerance = good...
Thanks, we know. It's not easy talking to a camera unscripted in the middle of a thunderstorm, I can assure you!
@@MrVinylista Good test of the subwoofer, that...
Is Kestrel available in the U.S. ?
Hi Larry - I'll find out for you.